"Such an Establishment and Such Arrangements!" Marianne Williams and Her Household in 1840s New Zealand

This paper will consider the household of Marianne Williams, educator and wife of the missionary Henry Williams, to explore how the practices, relationships and sensibilities it both facilitated, sustained and was sustained by - provided a place of connection, interaction and exchange within the context of early colonial settlement in New Zealand. Central to these processes was Marianne's relationship with the young Maori women she employed as servants. For Marianne, service provided the means to reconstruct Maori women's identities according to the class and gender structures she understood to underpin civilised Christian life. The Maori women she employed, however, often moved to the rhythm of their own self-determination, apparently indifferent to Marianne's aspirations. Nonetheless, in sharing the place and practices of the home, intimacies and loyalties emerged that allowed for the accommodations out of which a hybrid domestic culture emerged. Attending to Marianne's busy, open and industrious household complicates existing histories of colonial domesticity, ideas of colonial power and also a historiography in which both women, and the 'peripheral' places of Empire, such as New Zealand, often are of secondary importance.

Paper 3